Developer Ubisoft Ivory Tower’s The Crew Motorfest has been unleashed on the world. Does the latest addition to The Crew franchise live up to the hype, or should it be left in the garage?
Read on to find out
The Crew franchise first made its debut back in 2014 and was received well by gamers across the board. Our reviewer gave it an 8 out of 10 and found it to be a fun and exciting title. Developer Ivory Tower followed up with a sequel in 2018 and our reviewer gave The Crew 2 a 9 out of 10. Here we are five years later, and the next installment in the franchise, The Crew Motorfest, is ready for the masses and set on the beautiful island of O’ahu in Hawaii.
The Crew Motorfest Review – Get a Jump Start
For those gamers that played The Crew 2 and built up a nice stable of vehicles, your first question to answer will be if you want to import those vehicles into The Crew Motorfest. For us, that was a no-brainer and we instantly had a garage packed with 49 base model vehicles ready and waiting to be driven.
Quite a few of these vehicles, like the Koenigsegg Regera above, aren’t available to earn or purchase in Motorfest, so being able to import our favorite car from The Crew 2 is a real nice bonus. Keep in mind that none of the upgrades come with it, but still, a base model Koenigsegg is still an awesome car and you can earn new upgrades for it in Motorfest.
The Crew Motorfest Review – Hawaii is Gorgeous
The previous titles for the franchise were set in the contiguous United States, but Motorfest has been moved to the middle of the Pacific Ocean and set on the beautiful island of O’ahu in Hawaii. The Crew series includes just about every racing type of imaginable, so setting the open world environment up on an island was pretty smart. It also gave the developers a chance to create beautiful foliage, gorgeous beaches, and even the hellish landscape of an active volcano. They even included races that give you the history of the island state as you drive along. Playing the game on a PS5 in 4K makes this one of the best looking and smoothest running racing games we have ever played.
Not only is the environment gorgeous, the vehicles are all top notch digital recreations of licensed vehicles. When customizing, you can check out the interiors of these vehicles and see immaculate recreations. The exterior of the vehicles are spot on recreations of their real-life counterparts, and include makes from a wide variety of manufacturers from all over the globe and includes over 600 vehicles (official List).
The Crew Motorfest Review – So Much to Do
You might think using an island as an open world setting would limit the possibilities of a game like this, but you would be wrong. Unlocking fast travel takes completing nine playlists, so you’ll be driving from point A to point B quite a bit early on. We didn’t see this as a bad thing, since the vehicles are so fun to operate.As you complete playlists, you do unlock containers that can be fast traveled too, so at least there’s that option early on.
Motorfest includes almost every type of motor racing you can think of, so that trip to your next location could be done via the land, sea, or air. We had a couple of airplanes imported from The Crew 2 so we took some time to fly around and check out the scenery while en route to our next event. Quick tip here: You can set your favorite types of land, sea, and air vehicle to do a hot swap between them. The transition is pretty seamless, but might be awkward if you swap to a boat while going 250mph on a freeway. Surprisingly, swapping into a car or boat while flying won’t destroy your vehicle and works pretty well.
The Crew Motorfest Review – All the Action
The Crew Motorfest brings with it all of the arcade racing action we have come to love in the series, and includes dirt bikes, street bikes, street cars, hyper cars, off road racing, several types of boat racing, and even air racing. While there’s no real overall storyline like in past releases, there is side stories to some of the characters you’ll have to face off against. Some of these one-on-one battles can get very intense depending on your difficulty settings.
The racing can be adjusted to your style, and if you want more of a sim like experience, you can turn off assists and raise the difficulty to make the game more challenging. The game has the looks of a sim racer out of the box with the vehicle recreations, but you’ll need to tweak the settings to find that sim like racing feel. We did break out our Thrustmaster racing rig and give it a go and it felt pretty good with the wheel and pedals.
The Crew Motorfest Review – Conclusion
Developer Ubisoft Ivory Tower isn’t new to the racing genre, and even prior to The Crew franchise, the founders of the studio had a bunch of racing titles under their belt. It’s obvious they know how to create a great racing game and The Crew Motorfest fits right into that.
The Crew Motorfest is a top notch game, set in the incredible and gorgeous open world of O’ahu Hawaii, and not only creates great racing, but enriches the game with a history of this great state. We look forward to completing the weekly races and we look forward to the seasonal content.
Well done Ubisoft Ivory Tower.
9
The Crew Motorfest review code provided by publisher and reviewed on a PS5 using Thrustmaster peripherals. For more information on scoring, please read What our review scores really mean.
